GoogSpy: Business Counter Intelligence for Everyone
by Sandra Stammberger
Published on this site: May 12th, 2005 - See
more articles from this month...
So, you want to know what your competitors are up to these
days, or maybe you want to research a keyword campaign that
will rank you at the top of the heap for whatever product
or service you're selling? Meet GoogSpy, a special search
engine that not only shows you what Google AdWords your competitors
are buying, but it will display all of the search terms that
rank them in the top 10, PLUS it even displays their top 25
competitors.
What search engine does it base all of its intelligence on?
Well, with a name like GOOGspy, there can only be one. GoogSpy.com
is powered by a product called "WebScraper+" which
is the brainchild of Arizona-based Velocityscape. According
to Michael J. Roberts, Velocityscape's President, GoogSpy
extracts 500,000 search results per day from Google and loads
them into the GoogSpy.com database which it then makes available
for anyone to search.
Normally, when it comes to business intelligence software, a sentence
which read: "which it then makes available for anyone to search."
would end with the phrase "for a fee.", but that's not
the case with GoogSpy. At least for the time being the tool is 100%
free to use by anyone who cares to go to http://www.GoogSpy.com
and use it.
So, what's the value of such a powerful tool for the average business
web site operator? That depends upon how much value you place on
being able to see how a competitor spends their advertising dollar
and who else is competing with them.
The interface is fairly straight forward. You enter your search
term in the text box and click the "Search button. If GoogSpy
finds content it will display the company name, if any, as a hyperlink
under the company heading and the search terms, also as hyperlinks,
under the Search terms heading. If it doesn't find anything then
it doesn't display anything. For about two minutes more development
time the programmers could have added a "Sorry, your search
term did not return any results" message but I guess less is
more with these guys.
The fact that they are still building their database is apparent
when you enter some company names that should be found yet
are not. However, when a hit IS found, the information is
spot on. On top of that, the tool is pretty good at ferreting
out things you wouldn't normally consider. For example, do
a search on CIA.gov and you'll discover that the CIA buys
several AdWords in Google. Now that's spying!
They also have an option to browse by Company and Search Term,
but the interface for doing that is relatively useless for a serious
search. However, it can be a lot of fun if you're simply killing
time and want to see what you can see.
It takes a few minutes of clicking around before you get the hang
of what you are reading and how powerful a tool this really is.
If you are working on an advertising or marketing plan, whether
it be one that you'll really use, or one that your banker wants
to see, be sure to make a few passes through GoogSpy.com to see
what the rest of the your market is doing and how much they're spending.
It will be
worth the trip.
Sandra Stammberger is the owner of Insiderscripts. At Insiderscript's
programmers are working around the clock to develop affordable,
powerful money making scripts that will help you drive traffic to
your business. http://www.insiderscripts.com
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